Courtroom 125 was quickly packed when the doors opened on Friday morning. Gregory Alan Elliott’s family and friends congregated towards the right side of the gallery, Stephanie Guthrie and her supporters on the left, and journalists dotted in-between. The room was overflowing by the time the judge walked in, he first ordered extra chairs and later allowed observers to sit in the empty chairs normally reserved for a jury.

Judge Brent Knazan stepped up to the bench with a whoppingly large 89-page ruling and warned observers to look forward to a long day as he read through all of it. Moments before he started reading, the judge matter-of-factly looked up and said “oh, and Mr Elliott, you’ve been found not guilty.” It came so quickly I looked next to Lauren Southern to confirm, she nodded saying yes and we both tweeted out the good news.

But despite the liberating feeling of the judge’s ruling – Twitter will stay free place for the time being – there was one part that left a bitter taste in my mouth. The judge stated four separate times that Elliott had made homophobic comments, a stain on a historic and important court victory. I was having a difficult time reconciling my conversations with Mr Elliott with the person who wrote “Enjoy your AIDS, #TOpoli faggots”. How could this be the same man? Well, it turns out it wasn’t Elliott’s tweet.

Caution: SJW’s play dirty

So with a dark soul I visited the online version of the judge’s ruling and searched for the word “homophobic”, it wasn’t until the fourth time the word was used that I found Elliott’s alleged posting. My heart sunk a little further when I foind the full text- What sort of an animal would say this!

“Below that tweet is a tweet from Mr. Elliott: “@tapesonthefloor @rachelmack @amirightfolks You have accomplished nothing, and you will fall. Enjoy your AIDS, #TOpoli faggots.”

But then I looked a little closer and realised there was a mistake; the tweet was made by @greg_a_eliott, Elliott’s Twitter handle is @greg_a_elliott. The first account is a fake that uses one less “l” in “elliott”, it’s a vicious fake too- the account only had 24 posts, most were crude or obscene including a photograph of a penis. Whoever set it up clearly had the intention to damage Elliott’s reputation.

It appears that the comment was erased from the fake account, but it was forwarded and commented on by a hipster whose Twitter account is @tapesonthefloor:

It wasn’t only the court that was tricked by the fake account, Ethan Cox of Rhichochet.ca (formerly of Rabble.ca) fell for it too and was just as disgusted as I was. It’s interesting to see that Cox was part of the attacks. He’s not known to be a champion of accurate reporting, so it’s not unexpected he’d make the mistake- but how could the court?

Another question that needs to be asked is how did this tweet get into evidence? The judge discusses this in the section of the decision titled “The Proof that Mr. Elliott Sent the Tweets Attributed to Him.” Toronto Police Det Banglid used a social media tool named Sysomos to gather-up the defendant and formerly alleged victim’s tweets, Sysomos has real weaknesses as a forensic tool as it can’t collect tweets that have been deleted or from protected accounts.

The judge used the fact that “Elliott’s” homophobic tweet wasn’t picked-up by Sysomos as evidence of the software’s lack of reliability for the purpose for which it was used. He seems to be right about that, it’s hard to justify only collecting half of the evidence, but it appears that he failed to realize this tweet was a fake.

As much as it’s a relief to learn that the accusation was false, it’s equally disturbing to read through media reports accusing Elliott of making homophobic comments. The message went out globally in a report in The Guardian, the CBC mentioned it, VICE did of course, and a host of other publications who’ve mentioned the judge’s statement about homophobic comments.

It would appear that a serious injustice has been done, Elliott’s name has been smeared with false accusations yet one more time. Elliott’s family are unable to comment until they speak with their lawyer, let’s hope that he’s able to get the judge to issue an apology and that the media will do the right thing and cover the story as enthusiastically as they did his alleged remarks.

More to come on this story in the near future, and please stay tuned for a deeper analysis of the judge’s ruling and what it means for Canadians, and the people of Toronto.

Greg, if this does get an official apology from the courts , this may be the first time I know of that such will have been enacted by a court. … thanks to YOUR hard work and desire to get to the facts … nicely done my friend

My lawyer is working on this matter, and my #LGBTT friends are relieved. I heard that tweet read in court, and ignored it as everything was just a blur for me as the judge read for 4 hours.

And you are correct, SYSOMOS is seriously flawed software and should NOT be used for the gathering of evidence in ANY criminal investigations by ANY Police force ANYWHERE. …But that is another blog post, yes?

For the record (and REGARDING THOSE ABOVE who signal-boosted the “homophobic tweet” that was from a parody account), we have extensive evidence that @tapesonthefloor is closely affiliated with the first Toronto Twitter Trial complainant, Steph Guthrie. And, @EthanCoxMTL has disliked me ever since I called him out on not taking the “Pots and Pans Revolution” seriously :

—

@greg_a_elliott 27 May 2012 – 5:51 AM

#casseroles is about followers?
@EthanCoxMtl I’m up 300 in a week. Anyone tweeting #ggi strike w/ regularity picks up followers in droves!

—

Thanks again for your accurate and amazing #FreedomOfTweets investigative journalism.

As a gamergate supporter I know how flawed vice, guardian and cbc are when it comes to issues related to feminism and it does not reflect well on them. The verifiable facts are far between and getting a correction is practically impossible. Shame.

I can’t imagine why police would use software with serious flaws (and even promote it to other agencies at places like smilecon or whatever the fuck it’s called), when cops have every right and ability to subpoena the more reliable stored data directly from Twitter…

Is Bangild et al getting swag from SYSOMOS’s publisher in order to use and promote it?

Well, I’d not say that the software has flaws itself, it seems to be great at vacuuming up tweets and itemising them in a spreadsheet (without graphics, likes, and retweet records) as much as it is a flawed tool for a forensic investigation. The reality is that it doesn’t matter what tool one uses to do the job, unless one is a sysadmin working for Twitter, there’s no way to collect or document deleted tweets or tweets from people who’ve protected their accounts.

If I was to make a top 10 list of things the court should have but didn’t do, the first on the list would be to send a warrant to Twitter asking them to collect all tweets from all parties including deleted ones. The court has this power, it’s bizarre they neglected to exercise it-not doing so makes the whole case a bit of a joke from an evidence perspective.

Gregory, you have more support than you think. This story has to continue and has to spearhead a revolt against a very corrupt and political system that has taken over so much in Toronto and the rest of Canada.

An additonal thing I noticed too, was that before 1 pm on Friday, this article was available

After 1 pm, the article was removed from the TStar. I’ve emailed them twice to ask why, with no answer. This article was about the anonymous letter writen to the judge about the two twits, the crown attoney and the attorney General (all feminists).

“A trial involving harassment via Twitter took an odd turn Thursday when the judge revealed a letter he’d received earlier this week from a stranger claiming to have relevant evidence about the case.

The letter writer, whose name was not made public, alleged he is a former acquaintance of the three women Gregory Elliot is charged with criminally harassing on Twitter, according to a portion read to the court by Ontario Court Justice Brent Knazan.

“In the interest of justice I must inform you that (the three women) conspired in my presence to fabricate a criminal harassment complaint against Elliot,” the man wrote…
He added that he was told by two people in the summer of 2012 that the conspiracy extends to the Ministry of the Attorney General. ….Crown prosecutor Marnie Goldenberg said she was left speechless by the letter, which she first heard about in court.”

What happened to this letter? what happened to the story? there is no other info on this story I can find on the net.

Best of luck Greg! I know you never wanted this, but you have now become a hero for truth, justice and the freedom of speech!

The identity of the man who wrote the letter to the judge is a big mystery and I don’t know why he wasn’t asked to testify for the defense? A person claiming to be the writer has posted on this forum and others. He claims after he submitted the letter the Toronto Police tried to intimidate him (a colleague of Bangilds visited him at his home). The guy seems legit. He has been posting about this case after the verdict. It seems he is living in Boston now. If any law suits are filled against the accusers and police this guy would be crucial to winning the case.

In addition to submitting the letter to the judge (amicus curiae) the man submitted a complaint to the law society regarding the crown prosecutor’s involvement. It seems to me he would have been willing to testify so the BIG unanswered question is why didn’t it happen?

The link to the Star article works for me. What I find interesting in the Star article is the attitude of the judge Brent Knazan to the Amicus Curiae letter. He called it “inappropriate” and he said he “hoped it was a nuisance” and that he was “reluctant to upset the trial”.

What this tells me is Judge Brent Knazan had NO INTEREST in finding the TRUTH and NO INTEREST in seeing JUSTICE SERVED!! A man steps forward with evidence that could completely exonerate GAE and the Judge is see’s this as a “nuisance”?

If I was GAE I would file a complaint against the judge over this matter. He revealed with this incident that he was only interested in smearing GAE and dragging out the trial as long as he could so as to punish GAE.

I believe the author of the letter reads this blog and has posted here so if “TM” is reading this it would be nice if he could shed more light on this mystery.

It would not be the first time that the Toronto “Red” Star decided to re-edit their website to cover up an inconvenient truth, however they are about to learn that in the digital age nothing ever disappears down the memory hole thanks to the efforts of people like yourself and Mr Renouf. But how can we really expect objectivity from a newspaper that has in it’s founding documents a manifesto about how the government should own and control all of the major industries, excluding the Star itself of course. What’s amusing is how the far Left idiots and S.J.W’s go on about how Ezra Levant has been “successfully” sued for libel (which is currently under appeal) and therefore how he has no credibility as a journalist, when in reality he is a political commentator, but the Toronto Star who has been successfully sued for libel, and who spent four years literally trying to destroy Rob Ford, is somehow a vanguard of journalistic integrity. Well it isn’t, it’s a far left version of a supermarket tabloid whom aspires to become a Canadian version of the New York Times.

Congratulations Gregory on the verdict. It’s been a long hard road, no doubt.

As someone who regularly uses tools like Sysomos and Radian 6 for doing social media research, I have to say that it’s not the tool itself that’s the problem, so much as the manner in which it is wielded.

These social listening tools only pick up on publicly accessible, keyword matched results. If the keywords chosen are flawed, then you have incomplete results. Garbage in, garbage out. It seems to me that what’s needed are rules of evidence around how tools like these are used, that include showing the full boolean used to produce a set of results.

First step that should be done in such an investigation is to pull a complete dataset of every tweet going to and from the accused and accuser.

Volume of tweets was a key consideration from the judge in terms of whether the communications could be construed as harassment. The crown ought to be able to use these tools to see what the respective volume is and the broader context of it all. When you look at how many messages someone receives and sends daily and contrast it to the messages construed to be harassing, you get a better sense of whether the offending messages are overwhelming and inescapable. When you compare what the accused is saying vs every other person communicating you can quickly establish if the concern about that individual is reasonable or not.

Aside from any merit towards arguments of backroom politics influencing the decisions of the police and the crown, they need to get exceedingly better at how they investigate social media, and the courts need to be fixed so that trials don’t drag out for years on end.

WOW amazing discovery Mr. Renouf! Even before the judge issues an apology (if he ever does) I think it is very important that EVERY news outlet in this country be notified and asked to issue a retraction. In fact I think that this would make a good headline story for a local reporter “Judge duped by fake twitter account makes major error in ruling”. Ultimately the idiot detective Jeff Bangild is responsible for introducing FAKE evidence. I would submit a complaint to the OIPRD against him over this issue and the fact that Bangild presented evidence from the case in a public forum (SMILE conference) even though the case was before the courts! Not only that – as noted by Greg Renouf one of the complainants – Paisley Rae – was at the conference!! (the fact that Bangild and Scott Mills associated with the complainants before and after the arrest could be used as evidence of MALICE in any law suit against the police!!).

While we are all happy with the acquittal I think that the judge made other errors that should be pointed out.

The judge said that he believed Guthrie was sincere in her fear of Greg. Based on the evidence how can anyone believe that Guthrie was sincere. Given her record of trying to destroy people who she disagree’s with online by “doxing” them how could anyone believe that what happened to Greg was nothing but a set-up. Guthrie MUST be charged with public mischief (maybe the judge was trying to help out Guthrie and insulate her from public mischief charges).

Another MAJOR inconsistency I found in the judges ruling pertains to the issue of Heather Reilly changing her avatar. The judge said that he could not determine when the change was made and yet in the defense’s closing argument it noted that Reilly admitted under questioning that she changed the avatar BEFORE she met GAE online. Previously Reilly had testified on direct that she changed her avatar because she feared GAE – in essence the Defense was able to catch her in a lie (why hasn’t she been charged with perjury?) Is the judge trying to protect Reilly from perjury charges by fudging the evidence? Below are link to the relevant documents. I hope Greg’s lawyer will go over this and ask for a correction from the judge AND ask that Heather Reilly be charged with perjury!

“Ms. Reilly did not testify in any persuasive manner that she feared for her safety. At one point, she changed her avatar from a picture of her to a cartoon. There is no evidence that doing that changed the appearance of her tweets retroactively, And since no tweet appears with any avatar other than her @LadySnarksAlot cartoon, I cannot determine precisely when she did this, and Ms. Reilly did not say. She did not testify that she did this because she was afraid, but said it was because she received advice to do it.”

Refer to pts 248 and 249 of this document. Under questioning by the Crown Reilly stated that she changed her avatar when GAE “began to harass her” under the advise. On cross examination she admitted change was made BEFORE she met GAE online – i.e. she LIED UNDER OATH!! How come the judge is ignoring actual testimony? Why does he say HE can’t determine when avatar change was made when Reilly TESTIFIED that change was made BEFORE she met GAE online! Was the judge asleep? Or is he trying to keep Reilly out of hot water? Lying under oath – PERJURY is far serious than anything GAE was accused of.

I discovered similar discrepancy’s with the tweets that were presented in the disclosure documents and I sent an email to the Defense lawyer Mr. Murray in 2014 (which he thanked me for). I don’t know if this new exculpatory evidence made it into the trial. Here is what I sent to the lawyer:

QUOTE:

I don’t know if I have the correct Chris Murray who is representing Greg Alan Elliott. If I do I have some information which I believe could help his case (if I don’t have the correct Chris Murray please let me know).

I found online the disclosure documents and in reviewing them I notice something that I think is very significant.

In the disclosure documents they have captured all the tweets with the #feministfascists hashtag (plural) but I don’t see any for #feministfascist (singular).

If you search for #feministfascist (singular) tweets you get a completely different list of tweets!

If this above tweet (and others tagged with #FascistFeminist) was not part of the disclosure documents I believe this is a very significant omission which would warrant having the charges immediately dropped.

In the above tweet GAE is politely asking his accusers to block and unfollow him. Had they done so they would not have received ANY direct communications from him. How can Toronto Police charge him with harassment based on direct communications? At a very minimum I thought in order to charge someone with harassment you would have to prove that person tried to communicate directly with his “victims”?

Here we see GAE asking his “victims” to cut off all contact with him! If police are alleging that GAE communicated with his alleged “victims” through the use of “Hashtags” this is a completely ridiculous assertion since Hashtags are not a direct form of communication but rather a method of broadcasting a message to the over 200 million users of twitter should they choose to subscribe to that Hashtag! Furthermore there are third party programs like “tweet deck” which make it possible to screen out hashtag tweets from specific users if you don’t want to see their tweets. Since Steph Guthrie is such a expert on social media who makes her living “outing trolls” she MUST know about “tweet deck” (something to ask her on the stand). Same goes for the other so-called “victim” Heather Reilly – AKA “Ladysnarkalot”. Ask her why she didn’t install tweet deck if she was so bothered seeing GAE tweets.

If in fact you are the attorney representing GAE I can appreciate that you can not discuss the case beyond just a simple acknowledgment of this email however if in fact you are I have some other thoughts on this case that I believe would be very helpful to your client. I believe that what is happening to GAE is a complete travesty and the fascists behind this must not be allowed to succeed in fact they must be brought to justice! The so-called “victims” in this case should be charged with public mischief – and the idiot cop – Jeff Bangild – charged under the police services act for malicious prosecution and fired!

Another area where the Judge erred in my opinion is finding GAE “harassed” the complainants. This is complete nonsense. As I noted above GAE had asked this group to “un-follow and BLOCK” him. They did not heed his request. Instead they kept goading GAE going as far as accusing him of being a “pedophile” (even though they knew this was FALSE). The heated back-and-forth exchange between GAE and the complainants goes on MILLIONS of times each day. Flame wars are as old as the internet. If vulgar language was used it went BOTH WAYS – a FACT the judge ignored in his decision. This is not “harassment”

It seems to me that Brent Knazan knew from the start he could never convict GAE so he decided to exact his own form of REAL punishment by dragging out the trial for over three years. In his decision the judge seemed intent on smearing the reputation of GAE saying he “harassed” these women and was “homophobic” (a false accusation) . I think the judge is a disgrace and he should be called out and condemned.

If I was GAE I would submit to a major paper like the Star an editorial slamming the judge for his sloppy and biased conduct. GAE got his freedom back – now he needs to get his reputation back!

The judge was a technically illiterate moron incapable of reading on screen information. The ruling includes a small aside where the judge thinks that the computer telling him that it cannot find the proxy server or internet service means that someone has locked their tweets…

To be fair, though the judge is no expert in Internet technologies (we’ve got a couple more decades before Internet savvy judges hit the bench), he did a pretty good job overall at understanding it. It’s also important to note that the subject of fake accounts doesn’t appear to have come up during the trial, and this one was very skillfully created to deceive, so he didn’t know that he should be looking out for fake tweets.

I’m less concerned about the judge’s (or his clerk’s) mistakes than I’m concerned about who actually introduced this tweet into evidence. I was at most of the hearings but don’t remember it being mentioned. It’s “lettered” evidence, so it wasn’t introduced by the police- it was either the defence or the Crown. The Crown refused to release her final submissions to the public (though she did to one select journalist friendly to Guthrie), so I can’t confirm- but it seems likely that’s where it came from. If so, we need to look at this document and understand the context- was it a dirty trick, or perhaps it clearly stated it was from a fake account and the judge didn’t realise?

You would think that after spending three ridiculously long years on this sham trial the judge would have become an expert in Twitter. That tweets can be faked is well known and in the news lately. Lets see what kind of man the judge is. If he has any decency he will issue an apology to GAE first thing tomorrow morning for falsely smearing him with the label of “homophobe”

While I’m totally disappointed by the court’s mistake, I’ve watched this judge for three years and he’s done a pretty good job considering he’d never used Twitter before. As fake accounts go, this one was one of the “best” I’ve seen as far as it’s ability to deceive goes. I’ve been online since 1979, spent two decades of my life as a technology architect, and have been using Twitter for many years and I was almost fooled myself. If it weren’t for having clicked on the profile and seeing it only had a handful of tweets (something the judge couldn’t have done with the printed copy in evidence) I might have missed it myself.

As for the judge giving an apology in the morning, I’m pretty sure it won’t happen that quickly. Courts and judges are bound by established processes and procedures, it might not be so quick & easy to remedy the situation, especially considering the glacial pace of Ontario’s overburdened court system (which, in my opinion, is hopelessly broken). In the best case scenario, Elliott’s lawyer will contact the judge through the proper channels and a correction will eventually be made- in the worst case, it might be necessary to file with the appeals court, another lengthy and expensive process.

Time will tell, stay tuned for more information on how the remedy is progressing, I’ll publish an update as soon as I hear any substantiative news.

Something I wonder about is what – if any role – did goofy Toronto cop Scott Mills play in this saga? It seems that the meeting at the Cadillac Lounge was a key incident (supposedly this is when Heather Reilly aka @Ladysnarksalot aka Heather Arr on FB) suddenly felt in fear of GAE. I have seen pictures on this blog of Scott Mills socializing at the Cadillac lounge with Paisely Rae. Is this the meeting that Reilly was at? Did Scott Mills plant the seed in their heads that they could run to the police and cry criminal harassment?

Running to the police to complain about someone arguing with you on twitter is an extraordinary thing to do – even for SJW’s. Did Scott Mills – who goes by the CREEPY twitter handle “graffitiBMXcop” act as an enabler?

This is something that needs to be investigated (crucial in any lawsuit against the TPS). It may be difficult to prove but even in the absence of proof it is a question that I would be raising PUBLICLY if I was GAE. If in fact Scott Mills was at the Cadillac Lounge with Heather Reilly I would PUBLICLY raise the question if he had anything to do with encouraging their FALSE accusations! What is the connection between Scott Mills and Jeff Bangild?

Unless I’m much mistaken, this particular type of act – wherein a person (or persons) unknown impersonate another in an attempt to damage his reputation – is known as a “Joe Job”.

This particular form of character assassination is so named because the first documented incident of such an attack involved a gentleman by the name of Joe Doll, who was targeted after banning a spammer from his website; said spammer used spoofed email headers in several subsequent spam campaigns, which made it look like Mr. Doll was responsible for them (which, in turn, drew a vast number of irate emails to – and denial-of-service attacks against – Mr. Doll’s site).

I had people try this trick on me a few times back in the day when I was being swarmed by SJW’s back when I started writing about the corruption at Occupy Toronto and Occupy Vancouver. One of the accounts was very active,and many of the SJWs interacted with it to bring more attention before it was ultimately shut down by Twitter for violating their T&Cs.

Curiously, one of the people who participated in attacking me in cooperation with the fake account was a failed politician in Vancouver named Sandy Garrosino. I say curiously, because Garossino had launched an anti-bullying initiative at the time called the Red Hood Project alongside with the kids musician Raffi.The two actually conned Amanda Todd’s mother to work with them, while at the same time Garosinno was not only directly attacking me, but going after anyone in the media who dared to speak with them.

yep,
these “Joe Jobs”/impersonators/spammers still do this type of thing a lot on cbc.ca/news forums, with multiple fake accounts in the comment sections, but then again, we’re talking LoL, cbc comments sections? ;)

A truly sad state of the Criminal Justice system in Canada, the judge did not even verify the origin of the tweet and immediately associated it with Elliott. The courts are in need of dire updating with regards to internet awareness.

The judge claims that a person is “harassed” if they feel harassed. In that case the judge is guilty of harassment so long as any person feels harassed by his judgement, and his repeated false claims, such as regarding the fake tweets.

He needs to counter sue for damages. These “Feminists” these pathetic excuses for life, have gone out of their way to ruin another individuals life because somebody disagreed with their opinion. They should be the ones on trial, and they should have their lives ruined for such a disgusting display of disregard of human life. I hate this 3rd wave feminist bullshit, almost makes me wish we lived in the 1800’s.